BSC Collaborates with OpenFog Consortium

Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the OpenFog Consortium announced today that they will actively collaborate in order to accelerate proof of concepts and technical development of fog computing. Fog computing is the architecture for computing, storage, control and networking that distributes those services closer to end users along the cloud-to-things continuum, and is particularly useful in Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and 5G applications.

To reinforce and continue with our pioneering work on fog computing that started in 2008, we pursue synergies between leading technology companies and academic and scientific community,” said Mario Nemirovsky, Network Processors Manager at BSC. “By collaborating with the OpenFog Consortium, we will be able to contribute to the consolidation of an IoT platform for the interoperability for consumers, business, industry and research. We are looking forward to a constructive and fruitful collaborations with all OpenFog members.”

With this agreement, BSC and OpenFog will co-create and co-promote fog computing concepts and architectures and organize joint industry activities to promote fog computing. BSC will have access to OpenFog’s testbeds while OpenFog will have access to BSC’s supercomputing facilities to help test new concepts and fog computer-based use cases.

“This collaboration agreement makes sense on so many levels,” says Helder Antunes, chairman of the OpenFog Consortium. “Some of our members have already been collaborating with BSC on fog deployments – for example, Cisco, Nebbiolo Technologies and PrismTech’s work with BSC right in the city of Barcelona. Now we can accelerate industry adoption by sharing the OpenFog reference architecture with BSC’s high performance computing to prove new use case scenarios enabled by fog computing, leading to more rapid exploration of emerging, technically-challenging scenarios in IoT, AI and 5G.”

BSC is the national supercomputing center in Spain. Specializing in high performance computing, its mission is two-fold: to provide infrastructure and supercomputing services to European scientists, and to generate knowledge and technology to transfer to business and society. BSC is a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence and a first level hosting member of the European research infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). BSC also manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). BSC is a consortium that includes Spanish Government, Catalan Government and Technical University of Catalonia – Barcelona Tech.

The OpenFog Consortium was formed to accelerate the deployment of fog computing technologies through the development of an open architecture that identifies core technologies and capabilities such as distributed computing, networking and storage that will support intelligence at the edge of IoT. The OpenFog Consortium was formed by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft Corp, and Princeton University in November 2015, and has members in North America, Europe and Asia.

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